The Three Phases of Product Managers
The Three Phases of Product Managers
Understanding the common growth steps of product management
Even though I started my product management adventure more than a decade ago, I still learn something new daily. Change is the only certainty I face as a Product Leader.
The secret is curiosity and courage to embrace the unknown.
My journey has been full of ups and downs. Life has never been boring since I embraced the product world adventure.
Reflecting on my journey, I have been through three phases as a Product Manager. And I believe almost all product professionals go through something similar. Understanding your current stage will help you identify the required steps to grow.
Let me elaborate on Product Managers’ phases and how you can grow. Hope that helps you :)
What’s a Product Manager?
The answer to this question depends on who you ask. You won’t find a standard definition in the industry, but you’ll face many role mutations. Let me give you my definition.
Product Managers are accountable for maximizing business and customer value. The responsibilities go from strategic to operational, and they will dramatically vary according to the stage of your company. Some typical responsibilities are:
Vision: Define the Product Vision that empowers teams to make decisions and provide clarity on what they are striving to achieve.
Goals: Set goals that enable teams to get closer to the product vision. It’s crucial to define goals based on outcomes and not outputs.
Strategy: A promising strategy sets the proper context, audience, value proposition, and focus. It empowers teams to define what not to work on.
Discovery: Which opportunities will drive the desired business outcomes? To answer this question, Product Managers team up with UX Designers, Software Engineers, and whoever else is needed and strive to uncover problems worth solving. Discovery will consume a lot of time from Product Managers.
Delivery: This is the operational part, and in practice, it drains almost all energy from Product Managers, though it shouldn’t be like that. Ideally, Product Managers set the proper context and empower teams to deliver results.
The Product Manager job is complex and requires a lot of skills. These responsibilities are summarized. You’ll find different ones depending on where you are, but these are the fundamental ones.
The following image reflects the complexity of communication. You sit between chairs and have the mission of figuring out how to create value sooner.
“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.”
— Deep Nishar, Vice President of Product at LinkedIn
I didn’t write anything about the Product Owner in this section. The reason is simple. Product Owner is an accountability inside Scrum, not a job.
The accountability is best filled by an experienced Product Manager. To thrive with Scrum, you need to master product management.
If you want to learn more about it, I recommend this post
Now, let me share the three phases of Product Managers with you.
#1 Bridge
When I started my product manager journey, I thought my main job was to bridge communication between stakeholders and Scrum teams. Every day I talked to many business people, understood their wants, wrote down, and would later share them with the team.
It’s natural to be a kind of “bridge” Product Manager initially. The truth is that stakeholders often expect to own prioritization, solution definition, and strategy. That’s the reality for many companies. The reason is simple. They’ve never experienced another way of working.
When you act as a bridge, your activities will be more or less the following:
Gather Requirements: Asking business people what they want and creating precise requirements. You ask understanding questions but not challenging ones.
Manage the Product Backlog: Writing backlog items may consume most of your time. You probably need approval from stakeholders before refining the backlog with your team.
Moderate Sessions: You barely make decisions, yet you’ve got to align with several business stakeholders. You’ll spend plenty of time moderating sessions to get the required alignment to progress.
Focus on Delivery: Getting features live to please stakeholders is what matters. Deadline pressure drives your actions. You spend time answering the question, “How could we meet our deadlines?”
What’s the problem with the points I’ve just mentioned? You take a passive role. You’re not a leader but a representative of stakeholders. You cannot succeed as a Product Manager taking the passenger seat. Yet, this will give you essential learnings to advance to the next phase:
Communication: You’ll talk to many people and write several backlog items, e-mails, meeting notes, etc. This will sharpen your communication skills. You’ll make mistakes but, hopefully, learn from them.
Business Understanding: As you collaborate closely with stakeholders, you’ll build a vast business understanding. This will enable you to start asking powerful questions and help stakeholders to reflect deeply. Also, it’ll allow you to make your own decisions.
As you develop these skills, you perceive something is wrong. And you see a need for a change, and that’s when you move to the next phase.
#2 Conductor
I used to say great Product Managers were like conductors for a long time. Conductors don’t play any instrument during the concert, but they ensure the result is delightful music. Conductors are leaders, not managers.
After going through the “bridge” phase, Product Managers advance to the conductor stage. They focus on the goal of delivering value and strive to create the right conditions to enable that to happen.
Instead of bridging communication, “conductor” Product Managers invest more time connecting the dots. They treat business stakeholders as partners instead of customers. They focus on finding opportunities to reach goals and collaborate with the team to create valuable solutions.
As a conductor, you can observe the following:
Goals: Setting goals and getting commitment from everyone involved with the product. This is time-consuming but vital to focus on what matters most and remove what’s unimportant for the moment.
Problems: Uncover problems worth solving. Focus on identifying opportunities that enable teams to reach the agreed goals.
Solutions: Collaborate with teams to craft meaningful solutions to solve problems. Product Managers become responsible for the “why” and craft the “what” together with the team, while the team is fully responsible for the “how.”
Outcome: All that matters is creating valuable outcomes. You’re brave to pivot or drop an initiative when you realize the outcome isn’t valuable enough.
The most significant difference between the “bridge” and “conductor” is the attention to outcomes. When you become a conductor, you do your best to deliver value as fast as possible. Yet, something can improve. Conductors make many decisions alone and carry a heavy burden on their shoulders.
#3 Jazz Player
I thought the conductor phase was the ultimate version of outstanding Product Managers. Although I still believe it’s valuable, it lacks fun and spontaneity.
The conductor has a higher level than the team and a stronger decision power. In a high-performing team, that’s unhelpful. Everyone is equal, and they bond to reach goals together. Responsibilities may differ, but nobody has a higher level than the others. How could you change this scenario?
Jazz is the answer. Let’s have a look at its definition.
American music developed especially from ragtime and blues and characterized by propulsive syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre
I’d say improvisation and deliberate distortions can make the difference. In a Jazz concert, someone starts the gig, and the others join the music and compose music together. It’s complex, as improvisation drives everything. But highly skilled musicians can make outstanding music by improvising. The same is true for teams with highly-skilled professionals.
A Product Manager acting as a Jazz Player will set the context, and team members will build upon it. They relentlessly search for opportunities to create something innovative and outstanding. This scenario is more or less like the following:
Context: Product Managers bring the proper context to the team. Goal, audience, value proposition, objectives, and strategy. The team can help sharpen the context, and that sets the playing field.
Uncovering Opportunities: Everyone in the team has the same voice. They bring potential opportunities and evaluate whether it’s worth investing in them.
Learning: Curiosity is what drives them. As in Jazz, the team isn’t afraid to try solutions as fast as possible. They improvise and don’t fear embarrassment, but they’re scared of not learning fast enough.
I believe Product Managers take years to get to this stage. It requires a lot of confidence, expertise, experience, and courage.
You can only become a “Jazz Player” Product Manager when you learn how to check your ego at the door. Yet, you can benefit from a fun and unique environment.
Endnote
What I shared above is what I’ve experienced and observed so far. Being mindful of your stage can help you understand how to play the game and grow. As time passes, I may change my thoughts and eventually write another piece about it. As I started this post, change is the only certainty I have.
The following image illustrates the differences between the three phases. Hope it helps you.
Be open to the new and brave to challenge your perceptions. That’s how you grow as a person.
Note: Upcoming live training Product Owner Beyond Scrum on the 18th of March and 1st of April at 10 am CET. You may be interested to learn more about it. There are limited seats.
Very much agree with having the same voice...in really strong teams even the QA person will be passionate about product decisions in my experience